Sunvisors for vehicles have been manufactured of a plastic, shell-type core or frame covered with a material which is colored to match the interior upholstery of the vehicle. Early visor designs used a construction process wherein the edge of the material covered visor was trimmed using a trim bead. Particular designs stitched the trim bead directly into the plastic material shell or frame. This stitching is both expensive and difficult. In addition, these trim bead or stitched designs are unattractive to some users. Newer generation designs attempt to eliminate the trim bead and provide a neat and clean appearance of the visor edges while still effectively retaining the material covering on the visor shell.
Visor designs of this new generation necessarily require that the material utilized as a covering for the visor be pre-tucked or adhered inside the body of the visor before the two visor halves are attached or bonded together because the material covering tends to pull out or loosen during or after shell closure. The material covering adhesion process requires that a bonding cement or glue be used to attach the material covering to the inside of a shell half prior to construction of the visor as a separate operation.
One prior art visor discloses a visor core with a plurality of outwardly projecting pins and corresponding mating recesses and a framework pattern of ridges that act in conjunction as a fabric clamping structure when the respective halves of the visor core are brought together. The assembly process of this embodiment requires separate operations for placing and holding the fabric on the visor core, and insertion of a mounting post or support pin into a mating socket within the visor core. An additional operation is required to insert a sharpened metal pin through the end of the visor to hold the support pin in place.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,193,323 issued July 6, 1965, discloses a U-shaped yoke, the legs of which are pushed through the padding material so as to leave a recess and are hooked in a holder on the wire frame.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,570,990, issued Feb. 18, 1986, discloses in one embodiment the use of a snap ring combination or frame which compressively holds upholstery material against the walls of the core. In another embodiment, the upholstery material is wrapped around the free edges of the shell core and held in place around the peripheral boundary of the visor by adhesive and by the clamping action of the visor core itself.
The present invention incorporates the neat and clean appearance of the nonadhesion mechanisms for material retention while improving the efficiency and cost of production of shell type sunvisors.